All through Thursday and Friday, enquiries poured in on movement of cargo flights as the city waited with bated breath for the first batch of Covishield vaccines to arrive from Serum Institute of India, Pune. But till reports last came in, the flight and its precious cargo remained elusive.
“Since morning, we have been periodically receiving calls from anxious state health officials inquiring about the flight carrying the Covid-19 vaccines to Kolkata. But we have not yet been able to offer any definite information as we are as clueless as everyone on the issue. There has been no communication on the subject from Pune since Wednesday,” an official at Kolkata airport said on Friday evening.
Three flights did arrive at Kolkata airport from Pune on Friday, passenger aircraft operated by SpiceJet, GoAir and IndiGo. They also carried cargo in their belly. But they did not include boxes measuring 2ft × 1.5ft × 1ft. That is the dimension of the carton that will carry 1,200 vials. Each vial will contain 10 doses.
Bengal has requisitioned 50 such boxes to vaccinate 6 lakh frontline workers. After a couple of months, it will require another consignment of 50 boxes to administer the second dose to each of the vaccine recipients.
On Friday, Kolkata received six cargo flights: four international and two domestic. While the international cargo flights operated from Dhaka, Dubai, Doha and Hong Kong, the domestic flights arrived from Delhi and Mumbai.
In addition, there were 160-plus passenger flights that touched down at Kolkata till Thursday evening. But none had the boxes that everyone’s waiting for. Sources said the vaccines were likely to arrive in either a special Indian Air Force aircraft or an unscheduled chartered flight.
The Union health ministry had on Thursday evening written to the state health department assuring that the vaccines would reach Kolkata on Friday. Following the communique, senior state health officials had inspected the state government’s Central Family Welfare Stores in Bagbazar that will serve as the depot for storing the vaccine doses once they arrive in the state. The vaccines will subsequently be dispatched from here to other cold chain centres for the inoculation programme.
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